40. Are Display Ads the Best Choice for Your Blog?

Stephanie 0:00

If you're looking for a low effort way to increase revenue for your business, adding display ads to your website can be a great option, but is it the best option for you? Let's chat about it.

Stephanie 0:13

Hey there, teacher business owner, it's time to give your bank account a break and pause that ad campaign. I'm your host, Stephanie Royer, and I'm going to show you how to pay less for traffic.

Stephanie 0:25

Welcome back to the podcast. We're continuing Monetization March by talking about display ads in more detail. They can be an easy way to increase the revenue for your business, but they aren't necessarily an immediate Yes. There are definitely things to consider before setting up ads on your website. We're going to talk about some of the display ad options, and then I'll give you some food for thought as you decide if this is the best route for you to take for your business. I'll even share a little bit of my own experience with ads so you can really get a good idea of the good, the bad, and honestly, the ugly.

Stephanie 1:01

Just as a reminder from our episode earlier this month, display ads are basically where you allow other businesses to use space on your website to place ads and get in front of your audience. There are some website owners who sell their own ad space on their websites so they figure out where they want to put ads, they contact businesses or allow businesses to contact them, and they place the ads. But the majority of bloggers use third party companies to help them fill the advertising spots on their website, and this is the method I'm going to focus on for this episode. One of the most popular and well known third party ad networks is Google AdSense. This is a very self directed process, because you place the code on the back end of your website, and then from there, Google places the ads, you know, sells the ad space and fills it with the ads. You do have some control over where the ad space will be on your site, and what ad categories you're willing to have show up on your website. And then once it's set up, it is very plug and play. Google will fill up the ad space, and you'll earn money for that.

Stephanie 2:18

So then just quickly looking at the pros and cons of AdSense. A pro is that it's easy to get started right away, because there are no traffic requirements in order to get started. You could set up your website, get a few posts on there, and then apply for an AdSense account. The issue with that is that you likely won't make anything but pennies, and we'll talk a little bit more about that later. But one of the pros of Google AdSense is that you can get started with the ads right away. There aren't really any traffic requirements in order to get started. I mean, they do have some prerequisites, but overall, it's pretty easy to get into Google AdSense. I'm going to talk later in the episode about some of the drawbacks of Google AdSense. I think the main one to mention right now is that the ads really don't pay very much at all. So then we have Google AdSense on this side. On the other side of the spectrum, we have premium ad networks like Mediavine and Raptive. Where Google it was very much, you know, self serve, set it up yourself, monitor things yourself. Mediavine and Raptive provide a much more concierge experience when it comes to setting up the ads, and then you receive a lot of ongoing support for your ads while you're in their program. They can give you tips for where to put your ads to maximize revenue and maintain user experience. Now, obviously, for something like this, you do have to meet minimum traffic requirements. So as of the date I'm recording this episode, mediavine requires 50,000 sessions per month to your website, and Raptive requires 100,000 sessions, so it is reserved for those bigger websites. But if you have a website that's still growing, you might hear those numbers and think, well, there really aren't a lot of options for me, because I don't want AdSense, but I also am pretty far from the traffic requirements for Mediavine and Raptive. Up until recently, there really weren't a lot of great choices for websites with moderate amounts of traffic. The main options were ezoic and monumetric, and I think maybe she media anyway. So those were kind of the the moderate ad networks, and so they did earn more than Google AdSense, but you still did have to do a lot of the setup and optimization yourself, and even though the revenue was better than Google AdSense, it still wasn't awesome. And so most people would choose to wait on display ads until they qualified for Mediavine. Until recently. Mediavine launched a program called Journey, and this is for websites with around 10,000 sessions per month. And one of the perks of this program is that the revenue is much higher than those other ad networks for similar sized websites. Now, because of the lowered traffic requirements, you do still have to get things set up on your own and place the code and all of those things. You don't get the typical VIP support that's offered to mediavine publishers, but the income is definitely more substantial than those other ad networks like ezoic and monumetric, at least from my experience. And then I also wanted to mention just as a side note that Raptive also launched a program like this, but their prerequisite is 50,000 sessions per month, which by the time you got to there, you might as well just use the premium Mediavine network.

Stephanie 5:56

So I know that was a pretty quick introduction, but now that we've outlined the different types of options for display ads, I wanted to talk about some of the pros and cons of using display ads in general. The main Pro is obviously that it is passive income. Once those ads are on your website, you just let them do their thing with the right ad network and the right amount of traffic, this really can become a substantial income stream for your business. Another positive for display ads is that it provides additional motivation for creating new blog content, because it's so much easier to write a blog post when you know that once it's placed on your website, it will start earning income for your business as soon as you hit that publish button and market it to your audience. And I don't know about you, but that's just really motivating to me.

Stephanie 6:49

But now we need to get to the cons, because there are quite a few, especially for you as a teacher business owner, where the main goal for your business is to sell your products on TPT or your website shop. The first drawback is the impact that ads have on the overall appearance of your website. You're a teacher business owner, and you know how important it is to market your resources in a visually appealing way. Ads are not visually appealing. They never have been, and they never will be. And that leads me to the next con, because ads can impact user experience on your website. Not only are they not very pleasant for users to look at, but they can also make your pages load more slowly. Pop up ads can cover up your content. And then there are people who are immediately put off by ads and leave your website, which will then increase your bounce rate. And finally, display ads can impact your TPT sales. Like I just mentioned, websites with ads are an immediate no for some people. Other website visitors might give your post with ads a chance, but then bounce when those ads start to get in the way of what they're trying to read. If people aren't consuming your full blog post, they are much less likely to click through to the product you're soft selling in that post.

Stephanie 8:10

With such a heavy list of cons and drawbacks to display ads, you might be really starting to consider if they are the best choice for your business. So I wanted to go over just a few key factors to help you make this decision, and I'm going to sprinkle in some of my own experience to hopefully help give you a little more context. The first decision point would be how much traffic you currently have coming to your website. If you have less than 10,000 sessions per month, I would not recommend starting display ads, because your main choice is Google AdSense, and it is not worth the trouble. As I alluded to earlier in the episode, I tried Google Adsense in my early days of blogging. I figured that my posts were just sitting there, they might as well be bringing me a few bucks. I didn't expect very much money. I knew I didn't have a lot of traffic. I was just hoping that the ads would cover some of my website expenses. After a month or two, I would say it was going okay. My website was making about $1 a day. Again, I figured $30 a month of passive income was a pretty good deal. It would pay for one of my website expenses, and for that amount of money, I could even overlook the ugly foot fungus ads that were littering my blog posts, because apparently that was all my little site deserved were these horrible foot fungus ads. But then we hit the holiday season. I have a post that does really well on Pinterest each and every year like clockwork, and it sends me this really large burst of traffic for the months of November and December. Now, this is normally great, but this sudden influx of traffic triggered an automatic suspension of ads on my website. Google was worried that somehow I was using bots or something else nefarious to inflate my numbers. And then, since everything with Google AdSense is so automatic, there was nowhere that I could find a human to contact to explain, hey, this post goes viral every year, it's going to go back down. This is what's going on. All I could do was request a review and hope for the best. And this process, they warn you, can take up to two weeks. So basically, the time that my website was actually getting some decent traffic, it couldn't earn any money until the review process was over, because the ads had been suspended. But lost income aside, the main stressor in this situation was the fact that I wanted to remain in good standing with Google AdSense, because it could impact future YouTube monetization or approval for a premium ad network down the line. So as soon as that review process was over and I knew I was in good standing with AdSense again, I just turned the ads off and didn't look back. I did not want to risk that again. It just wasn't worth the few bucks I'd earn each month. So the next thing to take into consideration is whether or not the increase in ad revenue would be worth the loss of TPT income, because you won't know how ads will increase or decrease your conversions until you try them. So going back to my own ad experience, at the time Mediavine announced the Journey program, my blog did meet the traffic requirements for that program, so I went ahead and applied, and I have been really impressed by the revenue from this program so far. I earn anywhere from $8 to $20 a day. I think my highest day has been $35 in earnings. And like I said, my blog really is nothing special. It's a pretty small website. But then, as I've mentioned in other episodes this month, I do have one blog post that does really well for affiliate marketing, and I have noticed that my affiliate income has gone down since I started running ads on my website. Now I don't know if it's a direct result, but it is a change that I've noticed, and in my case, the ad revenue does make up for the loss in affiliate income, but for your business, that might not be worth it. You could also try to adjust which pages run ads and which don't. Eventually, I will likely turn off the ads on my best affiliate posts to see if I can kind of have the best of both worlds. Another factor to consider is how high of a priority your website esthetics are to your business. You need to decide if you would actually like the way your website looks when you're serving ads on it. You might decide that the money just isn't worth the change in appearance to your website and your blog posts, and that's totally fine. And then finally, you should consider if the additional income from display ads would be a game changer for your business. Maybe you decide to use display ads for a season when you're not able to create or market any fresh TPT products. Ad revenue in that case, could fill in some of the gaps. Maybe you're in a season of building up your business funds so that you can hire some extra help for a special project. Running ads for a season could help with that. Ultimately, only you and maybe your accountant know your business finances. So I can't give you advice on starting display ads one way or the other. All I can tell you is that running ads through Mediavine by Journey has made a huge difference in my own business budget. If you're interested in applying for Journey by Mediavine, I will put my affiliate link in the show notes below, and thanks in advance for letting them know that I sent you.

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, I'd love it if you could share it with a teacher biz bestie. You have created high quality resources. Now let's help teachers find them. I'll see you next time.